Chapter 11 (Part I): Fallout Plan

Verax probably had more confidence in Azraea’s abilities than any of her co-conspirators, but Azraea’s plan risked far more than her own life – it risked the success of Verax’s operation in Caelia. If Azraea’s plan failed, the dragon would consolidate her power in Caelia, and then it wouldn’t be long before she launched a war against the Gnoman Empire. She'd already laid the groundwork for it, stirring antipathy against Verax's people, and although she couldn't possibly raise an army powerful enough to challenge the might of the empire's Dexter Legions, she herself could devastate the northern territories of the empire, killing thousands of people. Preventing that was Verax’s top priority, and he had to leave as little to chance as possible, taking drastic measures if necessary.

True, it hadn’t been Verax’s only mission in Caelia. Besides securing the dwarven citadel, putting someone cooperative and friendly to the Gnoman Empire on Caelia’s throne was also one of Verax’s objectives. The empire needed neighbors – preferably vassals – that were sharp enough to run things in their own kingdoms without being micromanaged, yet humble enough to put the welfare of a collective society ahead of their own personal ambition. Verax had overturned multiple regimes at this point, and had developed a pretty long list of things that don’t work. His main sources for new leadership had been political circles, religious organizations, major businesses, and military forces. There were a few gleaming gems in every case, but they were always the exception to the rule.

Military commanders and businessmen alike were efficient, but overly focused on the bottom-line when it came to running their states – they might have some understanding of morale, but few of them fully grasped the idea that their subjects were not intrinsically motivated to follow their orders. Politicians and religious leaders both understood the unruliness of a people, but had their own faults. Politicians were groomed to focus on getting power and maintaining it – actually accomplishing anything with that power was, by necessity, an afterthought. Religious leaders – sincere ones, anyway – always had some mercurial set of beliefs that could become a problem at the most inconvenient of times, and always had an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and at least a portion of their subjects. And in most cases, leaders under pressure would fall back on what they knew – soldiers resorted to violence, entrepreneurs resorted to eliminating ‘bad employees’, and politicians resorted to bullshit. Oddly, the religious sort could be counted on to resort to any one of those three, seemingly at random.

So in Caelia, Verax had taken an interest in academia. Scholars were highly knowledgeable, hardworking people of low status – that held some promise. Unfortunately, most of the obvious candidates, the deans, tenured professors, and such had fantastically big egos for people of such low status in society overall. It may have been compensatory, but it made them as difficult to work with as anyone else.

But Azraea was fresh out of the academic mill, with a low class, salt-of-the-earth background and no significant connections to the kingdom’s existing power-players. ‘Humble’ might not be the right word to describe her, but whatever ego she had, she had come by honestly. And from the moment she had stepped out of one world into another, ‘Vinny’ had been there, reliable, friendly, and indispensable.

Vinny had stepped in and rescued her from a sexual predator, becoming the hero-of-the-day before Azraea would have been capable of gutting and incinerating the man herself. Had Verax known what a spectacular introduction it would be for Vinny, he might have staged the altercation deliberately, but unlike most things Verax did, his initial meeting with Azraea had been a matter of blind luck. That she came as a package deal with a demographically diverse party, including a trained fighter and a genius polymath, had simply made the whole thing all the more incredible. Ochsner, especially, was a high value asset. If everything else went sideways, Vidi had orders to drop everything else and take the dwarf south to the Gnoman Empire – forcibly, if necessary.

He tried to remember that luck was all that had brought his path across theirs. It was tempting to think of it as more – to think of it as fate – but fate was something he engineered for others, not something he followed. Nevertheless, among the various assets Verax had groomed, these three would likely always stand out as special in his mind, because he hadn’t scouted them with the same methodical approach he’d used in all of his years as a Left Hand. 
Verax had overridden that sentimentality, however, when he slipped out of the city and retrieved his backup plan. There’d been no way to haul Meingen's device through the submerged southern entrance that he had used to infiltrate the city, but after learning that Schroeder’s men controlled the small northern entrance to the city, it hadn’t been too difficult to get the weapon into the city. Verax had hoped he’d never see the weapon used, but if a city had to be reduced to ash, it was better that it be Kingstown than Gnoma.